“If I use my neighbors computer, there’s dissonance,” Mr. For programmers who are building programs and designs right from their imagination, every additional advantage in their work environment is one less barrier between their mind and the machine. It’s become almost a special cue to other members of the initiated-people have customized their keyboards with Solarized paint jobs and even created Solarized-inspired nail art.ĭevelopers may be overly opinionated, but they are also, by virtue of their work, obsessed with efficiency. Solarized has been made a default settling for text editor Sublime Text, and shows up baked into certain apps as the native color scheme.
Text editors painted with Solarized are clearly visible in the background of multiple shots. In a recent commercial for Facebook, if you look closely at the monitors, you can see their engineers working on Solarized text editors: This commercial, shot at the Facebook HQ, features Mark Zuckerberg himself. Still, Solarized pops up everywhere, and it’s hard to find a large development house that doesn’t have its trademark pale yellows and blues on at least one of its screens. It’s an astounding feat to create something so ubiquitously liked for a community often at odds with itself over any number of issues. Wherever developers go to congregate on the web and ask what the “best” color scheme might be, the answer is usually something like, “It depends on your preferences, but probably Solarized.” Since 2011, no other color scheme has been able to supplant Solarized as the crowd favorite. When he finally released the project into the wild, it reached the top percentiles of Github projects for the week. The color scheme is built for “syntax highlighting”-a sort of labeling system that colors certain elements of the code-and has a light mode and a dark mode, so that you can switch between them depending on the ambient light in the room. The combination of the two, he says, is a sort of “pleasant, fearful symmetry” that reminds him of his childhood, which was partially spent living near a forest lake.Įventually, he settled on eight hazy monotones and eight hazy background colors. “I realize there would be no visible light there, but that hardly matters.” Schoonover wrote when he first developed the palette. “I have a very strong, long term fear of death by drowning and this correlates to what I imagine is the green blue of deep ocean water, filled with the sediment stirred up by the ocean liner as it impacts on the seabed,” Mr.
#SOLARIZED COLOR SCHEME FULL#
Speaking of aesthetic beauty, we're currently living through the Golden Age of art in indie games- click here for the full story. The deep blue, when viewed at 96 percent opacity, taps into one of his long-held phobias. Schoonover’s narrow synesthesia-it’s a color he associates with pleasant sounds, shapes and pieces of music. Schoonover’s preferences, and the justification behind those particular choices is extremely personal.
Not everything about Solarized is a necessary choice, per se, in that any one color is objectively the “best” choice. Solarized’s base colors of blue and yellow aren’t somehow better colors than any other. Schoonover said, “I would get very, very focused on A/B testing different reds, just booting up and tweaking.” “I spent probably three weeks looking at red,” Mr. Because of how computers display red, and how the human eye sees it, it’s tougher to discern different shades of red than other colors. Solarized’s raspberry red, for example, only appears very sparingly as a zest, and red is particularly difficult to work with for optical reasons. He immediately began work on Solarized, which took him six months of research and tweaking. He’d never seen a color scheme that exhibited any “design rigor,” so he set out to make something that would be beautiful and soothing, and would work with any programming syntax.Ĭertain colors presented unique challenges. Solarized comes in two versions-light or dark-optimized to be kind on a coder’s eyes, depending on the ambient light. He switched to a new text editor, and arrived at the mouth of a rabbit hole where so many programmers find themselves: He was unable to find a color scheme he liked. from a seven-year stint running a photo studio in Hong Kong. Schoonover, who’s been a designer, coder, marketer and photographer, had just gotten back to the U.S. “One of the more jaded monks said it was probably not the life for me.” “The core problem of my entire life is the struggle between minimalism and aesthetics,” Mr. He tried his hand at being a Bhuddist monk in Thailand nearly 20 years ago, but had to give it up after a great struggle with the decor of his concrete space. Schoonover is a true obsessive when it comes to design.
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